Managers or administrators of computer systems such as data processing or communication systems which employ a number of data terminal operators generally desire to monitor how efficiently operators use their time, and to gather other useful information on the use of computer system resources.
Prior art statistical data collection systems include manually completed tally or "tick" sheets on which an operator is required to enter and/or check-off various information such as the number of customers serviced, the type of service rendered, or other similar statistical type information. Such manual record keeping is cumbersome and inaccurate. Additionally, in order for such manually gathered information to be useful to a data processing system manager or administrator, the manually entered statistical data must be keyed as input to a program or data base capable of analyzing, arranging and reporting the data.
Prior art computerized statistical data collection systems are operative only on one host computer and accordingly, such prior art collection systems are not aware of any operator functions performed by an operator with another host or peripheral. Therefore, such prior art systems can generally only count the number of terminal key strokes, or the number of times an application program is accessed. Such prior art systems thus report only a very limited amount of statistical information by application program or by terminal node. Additionally, the prior art statistical collection systems are not aware of and cannot keep track of "local" terminal operations such as resizing the screen, etc. Finally, such systems typically require a great deal of host system interconnection, which in turn affects host performance. Host performance is also affected by the storage of large amounts of statistical data on the host system.
An additional problem arises when a plurality of data terminals are connected as "logical units" serviced by one controller or resource server employing logical unit pooling, and which in turn is coupled to one terminal node of a host computer. In such a topography, logical unit pooling by the controller or resource server prevents the host system from reporting true operator by operator statistics since many operators access the host via the one terminal mode.